Koch versus Rosenberg

Hitler appointed the Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg
(1893-1946) head of the Ostministerium (East Ministry)
in charge of administering the territory of Ukraine. Before
the war Rosenberg was pro-Ukrainian and anti-Muscovite
(Russian). He planned to establish a Greater Ukraine state
taking territory from Western Russia. However, Hitler had
a different idea. He thought Ukrainians should get no
preferential treatment and personally appointed Erich Koch to
rule Reichskommissariat Ukraine (eastern Ukraine) with
an iron fist.

Koch, as a member of the superior German Herrenvolk
master race, started a reign of terror and oppression in
Ukraine. Koch often said that the Ukrainian people were
inferior to the Germans, that Ukrainians were half-monkeys,
and that Ukrainians "must be handled with the whip
like the negroes." He once said that "no German soldiers
would die for these niggers [Ukrainians]."

During the first year of the war Koch encouraged the
use of whips on Ukrainians. "In November 1942 about
twenty Ukrainians were whipped by the police because they
sabotaged important bridge construction across the Dnieper.
I knew nothing of this measure. Had I known ... I probably
would have had these Ukrainians shot for sabotage." - Erich
Koch, March 13, 1943 (Dallin p. 157). On April 18, 1942
Koch finally banned the use of the whip on Ukrainians, Koch's
brutality towards Ukrainians was approved by Hitler,
Goering, Bormann, Sauckel and Himmler. However
Rosenberg and Goebbels did not approve of his methods.
Although Rosenberg was the superior of Koch he was too
weak to control Koch and Rosenberg's pro-Ukrainian plans
were shelved very early in the war.

Hitler was intent on destroying education and culture
in Ukraine. During a visit to Ukraine in 1942 Hitler said
Ukrainians "should be given only the crudest kind of
education necessary for communication between them and their
German masters." Erich Koch ordered: "I expect the
General Commissars to close all schools and colleges with
students over 15 years of age and send all teachers and
students, irrespective of sex, in a body to Germany for
work.... I require that no school except four-grade elementary
schools should function." All schools above grade four were
closed in January 1942 and also all universities were closed
as well.

Like Bormann and Goering, SS leader Heinrich
Himmler said that "the entire Ukrainian intelligentsia must
be decimated." (Dallin, p. 127).

Reichskommissar Erich Koch, a cruel and vicious German
who called himself "a brutal dog," once said "If I
find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table
with me, I must have him shot." He condemned Kiev to a slow
death by famine and made his "capital" Rivne which was a
small town of 40,000 about 200 miles west of Kiev.

Koch was ordered to provide 450,000 workers a year from
Ukraine for German industry by "ruthless" means, according
to Reitlinger. German documents said that the Ukrainian
Ostarbeiter would be "worked to death." Although 40,000
Ukrainians a month were being sent to Germany as Ostarbeiter
(slave laborers), armaments minister Albert Speer complained that his work
force was dwindling. This would mean that more than 40,000
were dying every month.

In one memorandum from Fritz Sauckel to Alfred Rosenberg
there was a demand for one million men and women in four
months at the rate of 10,000 a day and more than two-thirds
were to come from Ukraine. In all the major Ukrainian cities
the German army kidnapped young adults off the streets and
shipped them to Germany as virtual slave laborers to work in
the worst and most dangerous conditions. On the orders of the
German administration Ukrainian cities were to be permanently
depopulated by starvation and deportation.
About three-quarters of the over 3,000,000 Ostarbeiter
were Ukrainians. Prof. Kondufor's statistic is that 2,244,000
Ukrainians were forced into slave labor in Germany during
World War II. Another statistic puts the total at 2,196,166
for Ukrainian Ostarbeiter slaves in Germany (Dallin, p. 452).
Both of these statistics probably do not include the several hundreds
of thousands of Galician Ukrainians, so a final total could be
about 2.5 million. There were slightly more women than
men Ostarbeiter employed in agrilculture, mining,
manufacturing armaments, metal production and railroads.

For example, on September 3, 1942 Hitler demanded that half
a million Ukrainian women be brought to Germany to free German
women from housekeeping. Hitler thought there was a Germanic
strain in Ukraine because the Ostro-Goths and Visi-Goths had
lived in southern Ukraine 1,800 years earlier and the "chaste
peasant virtues of Ukrainian women" appealed to him. In the
end only about 15,000 girls were taken to Germany to work as
domestics. The other two million Ukrainians worked mostly in
the armaments factories including the V-2 rocket factory at
Peenemunde.

At the end of the war some 120,000 Ukrainians registered
themselves as displaced persons (DPs). Most Ukrainians who
survived the war in Germany were forcibly repatriated to the
USSR because of the Yalta agreement. Repatriation almost
always meant death or exile in Siberia.